Better Living Through Biosensors

The ideal sensor will, like your nose or tongue, be sensitive, specific, versatile, portable, and selective enough to work even when faced with realistically complex samples. Given the affinity, specificity and generalizability of biomolecular recognition, biosensors (analogous to those on your tongue) have been widely touted for their potential to meet these challenging goals. To date, however, the translation of protein- and nucleic acid-binding events into convenient, highly selective sensing technologies has proven difficult. We have solved this problem by employing the binding-induced folding of biopolymers as a robust means of transducing binding events into specific, easily detected outputs. The resultant folding-based sensors are rapid (minutes to seconds), sensitive (micromolar to femtomolar), and generalizable to an enormous range of protein, nucleic acid and small molecule targets. The sensors are also reagentless, reusable, and selective; enough so that they can be used to monitor in real time the concentrations of specific molecules within the living body.